"...Magic does things to things, if I make a portal between points A and B then you can have all kinds of philosophical discussions about what exactly is happening and whether the space between points A and B meaningfully exist, but like, from a practical perspective, the portal exists."

"...our magic isn't nearly so discerning about things having to exist."

"But if it's not doing a thing to a thing then what is it doing."

"I mean, the Scholomance was built with materials, they had to haul in all the ductwork and whatnot, the magic was arguably done on that? And the thing done to it was putting it in the void."

"Okay--you said you get stuff from the void, how do you do that, does it just appear out of thin air."

"Well, no, the void isn't air, it's actually sort of spongy if you poke it, but things appear from it. They don't have to traverse any distance to do that since it's not a place."

"So it's--pokeable?"

"You can walk right into it if you want, but if you hang out there too long some combination of hypoxia and not being in a location will fuck you up a bit, people come back from that unable to speak any languages anyone else can. Which surprisingly doesn't always render them crippled to the point of promptly dying of this or that but is certainly inconvenient. And if someone shoves you in so far you can't get back on your own you... don't. Nobody's sure what happens there."

"Huh. I've never heard of anything like it. Anytime anyone tries to go nowhere they go somewhere instead, even if it's not a very hospitable somewhere."

"Well, I guess your magic doesn't interact with the void as we know it then, I don't think any of us know how to do anything much with it, though."

"Do you have anything that isn't the real world and isn't the void, because you said you don't know about any afterlives and it might help to be less crowded."

"No, just those."

"Yeah we live in a real crowded neighborhood, loads of somewheres to end up by accident. That'll probably do it. It's a shame, the spellbook thing is exciting."

"Well, I'm sure you can very easily hire someone to do it up for you if the worlds make proper contact."

"--Sorry if I seem ungrateful about not living in a world that's trying to kill me, I'm just--a really big magic nerd."

"It's refreshing, honestly."

"That it's not immediately emotionally salient to all of us that your world is lethal?"

"That you've had time for non-survival-related hobbies."

"--I mean, magic nerdery seems like it would be pretty good as far as survival-related hobbies go, albeit with more practice in not getting distracted and going off on tangents, but the latter might be, uh, obviously loadbearing."

"I mean, yes, we do have to learn magic. But it's in a - very focused way. Even the people with relatively frivolous affinities have to figure out how to use them to trade if they can't leverage them directly."

"Very focused like how...? I'm not immediately thinking of an area of magic that wouldn't be useful for survival, like, okay, individual spells, sure, and it'd be important not to--you don't have complications you probably don't have restrictions either--and there's nothing stopping you from getting to rank five in something and not starting the next thing until then--except you don't have ranks at all--uh, are you saying everyone has to specialize real hard?"

"- I mean, learning a given spell competes for time spent on other things? I don't know how long it normally takes you to learn them but anything complicated for us can be kind of a bitch to get down, especially out of affinity."

"--Well, there's a difference between learning individual spells and learning theory."

"We do learn theory but in a - practically supportive way, like, usually there is something want to do stuff in and you learn the theory behind that."

"...But learning theory makes learning individual spells easier? For academics, anyway. And warlocks who are pretending to be academics, apparently."